


Hologramatic Lager

by Sherb42



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Gen, I couldn't think up a summary i'm sorry, I have no idea what tags to put here, I talk about Ace for 2000-ish words, he needs a hug, less sad and more self reflective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 22:28:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16901001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sherb42/pseuds/Sherb42
Summary: There is a man in deep space sitting alone on the wing of his ship. He sips on a can of lager, watching the clouds of lonely gas giant swirl by. This man doesn't have a spacesuit on, he'll never need one.





	Hologramatic Lager

**Author's Note:**

> It's been around 6 years since I last published any sort of fanfiction, so excuse me if I'm a little rusty to it all. This was first written to be part of another bigger project, but I thought it would work as it's own little thing. That might change in the future, who knows.
> 
> Not me, that's for sure.

The distant stars glimmered through an infinite inky black abyss. 

Far, far away from the crew onboard Starbug, a bright red ship with its plexiglass cockpit wide open sat in deep space all alone - spare solar panels were sprayed out facing a nearby pair of yellow suns. There was a man sitting on one of the small ship’s wings, his shiny golden jacket unzipped and a faded JMC issue cream coloured tee-shirt on display. He had taken off the tacky wig that he usually wore and sat with his curly brown hair floating freely in the wind. Well, it would have been wind, if he and his ship weren’t in deep space sitting in the orbit of a large moon nowhere close to a breathable atmosphere. The moon reminded the man of his childhood home of back on Io. Of course, it wasn’t Io, it wasn’t even close, he had absolutely no idea what the moon was even called if it was to ever have a name. Even the twin stars and the planet it sat around had never been identified by anybody. This man was in the middle of nowhere. 

He drummed a leather-gloved hand on the wing. This man didn’t need a spacesuit, he never would. He was a hologram. A being of light who don’t need to bother with that sort of thing. The Hologram’s name was Commander Ace Rimmer, or simply just Ace. That wasn’t the name he was born with, but there was something better about this new name, something heroic that he loved getting tied too. 

Ace watched the clouds of the faraway gas giant swirl and move, a sight that never got old for him. He had a can of Lager in one hand and took a sip from it every once and a while as he sat. It was a hologramatic can filled with hologramatic Lager, produced by the small projection unit that chugged along near the fuel tank of his ship. There were several reasons for this. One, being that real liquid would float into space in an orb of liquid after it left the can, making it hard to drink normally, a second reason was that things never tasted quite right in a vacuum. You can always tell. There was also another good reason that he was drinking hologramatic Lager; It was simply because he didn’t have any real cans left. He hadn’t had any left for quite a while now. 

As a hologram, Ace didn’t need to eat or drink. Of course, he could experience what it was like if what he was having was also computer generated, and since he became a hard-light projection he was able to eat and drink as usual, but he still didn’t need to. He didn’t need to breathe and as long as he had a working light bee and a source of power to keep him projected, and he was virtually immortal. Ace could still feel heat and cold, but it was an easy fix to turn that bit of his programming off when he needed too. The only sounds he could hear this far into space was the chug of his ship and a soft hum of a battered up Light-bee that sat in the middle of his chest. Both sounds had long faded into a distant background hum. It was like the heartbeat of somebody after a long hug on a sofa or a quite underground train that was taking you to another domed Io settlement after a long day. Those were the sounds that you don’t realise how much they mean to you until they’re long gone. 

Ace wasn’t a sappy person. As soon as he realised how poetic he was being thought all that stuff he broke out of his daydream of hugs and trains and aggressively chugged the rest of his Lager, making the empty can disappear in a poof of soft light when he crushed it. He noticed that there was a huge lightning storm brewing towards the north of the gas giant. His scanners hadn’t picked up the hint of life below, the planet just carried on. Maybe he was a bit like that. Ace wasn’t alive. He had been dead for centuries. Like the planet below him, he carried on. 

He didn’t quite know if he was lonely or not. Ace had spent his whole life alone and pushing people away, being alone in deep space like this never felt like much of an escalation. It was the sort of loneliness you get when a plan you didn’t want to go through with gets cancelled. Sure, it’s nice, but you’ve lost out on whatever experience it would have been, no matter how shit it would have been in the end. 

He stretched and stood up on the Wildfire’s wing as he walked back to sit in the ship’s cockpit. His boots were designed for antigrav travel, wherever they were pointed was down. The leather seat of the ship was well loved, and the control’s worn down after an eternity of adventures. His eyes met with a small collection of sun-bleached polaroids stuck to the dashboard with a smile before he pulled the window down. Usually, the ship would then begin to fill with breathable air for its pilot, but Ace had long ago told the computer not to bother unless he had a passenger, which was very seldom. 

Do you know what the coolest part of the Wildfire is? This ship was one of the first of her kind, a Titian-style red dogfighter equipped with a drive that allowed it to leap into parallel universes. It had been once created to break the time barrier, but it instead ended up being able to jump though realities. If there was a timeline where every coin flip ever ended in tails (and as a result scientists could never figure out how or why that was, other than the chance of that happening was beyond what they could calculate), the Wildfire could find it. A version of Earth where Morris dancing music got popular in the early 21st century? The Wildfire had been there once, and a decent-sized box of 12-hour cassette tapes form it sat in the small storage bay under the ship from that little adventure. 

One of the more interesting things, however, was that the drive was also calibrated to jump the ship in such a way that Ace crossed path with alternate versions of himself. Some never joined the space core, some never died onboard Red Dwarf and lived with a hologram of his old bunkmate for the company. One of the alternate versions of him left Red Dwarf two days before the Radiation leak taking medical leave and had to deal with all of JMC getting on top of him, struggling to work out the situation and legal risks of losing either ship and all of it’s crew, bar one that couldn’t be saved for almost 3 million years and a cat. The poor guy probably wished to have died on the ship after that whole ordeal. In another, he had a son with an old fling that became a captain of his own ship, and in another, he was an impressionist who did stand-up for a living. The list could go on and on forever. Some of Ace’s polaroids where from dimensions like that. Dimensions where things went well for him and dimensions where things didn’t. Most of them didn’t. 

But hey, a photo of somebody is a photo of somebody, right? 

Sometimes these realities were playing at different times, making it feel like he was also time travelling when he jumped into these ones. Some went faster or slower, some went backwards where the laws of cause and effect were swapped. There was even one that was exactly the same as his except everything happened exactly 23 minutes later. One adventure, a long time ago, found Wifefire equipped with an old time drive of some kind. Ace had never used it, he’d already had bad experiences with jumping through and messing up the timelines and didn’t need to add to the list by mucking around with technology that he didn’t fully understand. 

In this reality, Ace wasn’t the first person to Pilot this ship, or even the first ‘Ace’. Not even close to it. Over time each Ace is defeated one way or another and recruits other versions of himself to replace them. Much of the cargo the Wildfire had, as well as software and even the photos, were from past Aces. Wildfire was a duct-taped hodgepodge of the best of the best she had encountered while under the command under a long list of all the past Aces. That what happened to this Ace and would happen after him, going on forever as long as there is a copy of himself out there to take up the mantle. The Aces of the multiverse where heroes, savours of people and a guiding light for those that he encountered. Ace was a symbol, the hero that the universe needed. 

This Ace never felt like that. This Ace was a coward, the type of person who works for a company for 15 years and only gets promoted to ‘slightly better grease monkey’ out of what he was pretty sure was just pity. He had a mental breakdown every time he had to take a test and had ship nurses used to joke that he should get a punch card for the number of times he came in to see them. The first time he took a written test to start his journey to become a pilot in the Space Core he ended up not only with an IV in his arm but a black mark on his record that said he'd never be allowed to fly again. Once, a ship shrink suggested that he had childhood trauma accosted with being tested that needed to be dealt with, but he ran out of ship-issued sessions and stopped going to see them. 

Ace had never felt like he belonged to be that heretic person. He still didn’t believe in the character that he played when he had to step up and be a hero. But no matter what he felt, that character needed to be played. Somebody had to do it and he was the person chosen. For years now, he had been Ace with a forced smile and a shiny costume. For years he had saved countless people and seen many wonders of the universe as he did so. Ace signed and adjusted his grip on the controls of the Wildfire and flicked a few switches to bring the solar panels back in. 

Ace was the daring space hero that he had always dreamed to become. He had everything that he ever wanted, and he knew that a sulk out in deep space wouldn’t be enough to take that all away from him. This was his Wildfire, and things could only go up from here.


End file.
